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Editor’s Note

“Curious & strange guide…”Never go on a trip without checking what quirky and obscure sites lurk around the corner there. Take a much-needed trek off the beaten path to discover that the world is far more fascinating (and weird) than you ever imagined.

Ashley M.

Scribd Editor

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Summary

It's time to get off the beaten path. Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 700 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.

Talk about a bucket list: here are natural wonders—the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that's so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan's 40-year hole of fire called the Gates of Hell, a graveyard for decommissioned ships on the coast of Bangladesh, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.

Created by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton, ATLAS OBSCURA revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book to enter anywhere, and will be as appealing to the armchair traveler as the die-hard adventurer.

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INTRODUCTION

When we launched Atlas Obscura in 2009, our goal was to create a catalog of all the places, people, and things that inspire our sense of wonder. One of us had recently spent two months driving all over the United States searching out tiny museums and eccentric outsider art projects. The other was about to set off for a year of travel in Eastern Europe. We wanted a way of finding the curious, out-of-the-way places that don’t often make it into traditional guidebooks—the kinds of destinations that expand our sense of what is possible, but which we would never be able to find without a tip from someone in the know. Over the years, thousands of people from all over the world have joined us in this collaborative project by contributing entries to the Atlas. This book represents just a tiny fraction of what our community has unearthed.

Though Atlas Obscura may have the trappings of a travel guide, it is in truth something else. The site, and this book, are a kind of wunderkammer of places, a cabinet of curiosities that is meant to inspire wonderlust as much as wanderlust. In fact, many of the places in this book are in no way tourist sites and should not be treated as such. Others are so out of the way, so treacherously situated, or (in at least one case) so deep beneath the surface, that few readers will ever be able to visit them. But here they are, sharing this marvelously strange planet with us.

This book would never exist without the incomparable and indefatigable Ella Morton, who has spent the last four years researching, writing, and crafting the physical object you hold in your hands. Nor would it exist without our incredible community of users, explorers, and contributors. Every one of you out there who added a place to the Atlas, made an edit, or sent in a photo: You are all our coauthors. Thank you. Though we have tried to check the accuracy of every fact in these pages, please don’t book any plane tickets without first doing your own independent research. Or do! Just be ready for an adventure.

We often ask ourselves just how large a truly comprehensive compendium of the world’s wonders and curiosities could ultimately be. The economics of printing and the dimensions of the page set limits on what could be included in this book. But even our website, which faces no such constraints, can never be complete. There is an Atlas Obscura yet to be written that is as comprehensive as the world itself, for wonder can be found wherever we are open to searching for it.

Eastern Europe

Scandinavia

DENMARK / FINLAND / ICELAND / NORWAY / SWEDEN

GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

ENGLAND

The Silver Swan

NEWGATE, DURHAM

This uncannily lifelike musical automaton mimics a full-size swan floating on a pond of spun-glass rods. Created in the 1770s, it uses three clockwork mechanisms to perform a 40-second routine set to calming bell-like music. When wound, the swan moves its neck from side to side to preen its feathers before dipping its beak into the pond and snatching up a tiny fish.

First displayed in British jeweler James Cox’s Mechanical Museum, the swan was purchased by collector John Bowes in 1872 and is now housed in the Bowes Museum—a French chateau in the north of England.

Bowes Museum, Newgate. A museum curator demonstrates the swan at 2 p.m. daily. The Bowes Museum is 17 miles (27.4 km) from Darlington railway station, which is a 2.5-hour train trip from London. Buses run from the station to the museum.

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Walking, Eating, Moving Machines

Automatons—mechanical figures that move in an eerily lifelike manner—have existed for centuries, but their heyday was during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Turk had a human microcontroller.

The Turk, built in 1770, was one of the most impressive: It consisted of a mechanical man in a turban who played chess against anyone willing to take him on. The machine toured the world, battling opponents like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. During the early 19th century, the Turk’s apparent intelligence and skill dazzled audiences and frustrated skeptics, who suspected a trick.

In the end, eagle-eyed observers, including Edgar Allan Poe, who encountered the Turk in Virginia in 1835, discovered the secret: a hidden human. The cabinet beneath the chess board held a squashed chess master who made every move by candlelight, pulling levers to operate the Turk’s arm and keeping track of the moves on his or her own board. The Turk was nothing but an elaborate hoax.

While the Turk was frustrating its opponents, genuine automatons delighted onlookers with their realistic movements. The Digesting Duck, the 1739 creation of Jacques de Vaucanson, flapped its wings, moved its head, ate grains, and shortly afterward defecated. The digestion process was not authentic—the duck’s backside housed a reservoir of droppings that would fall in response to the amount of grains being eaten—but it was the first step toward what de Vaucanson hoped would eventually be a genuine eating machine.

Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his two sons spent six years starting in 1768 crafting The Musician, The Draftsman, and The Writer, a trio of dolls now housed in Switzerland’s Museum of Art and History. The female musician plays an organ, her chest rising and falling to mimic breathing and her body moving in the manner of an impassioned pianist. The draftsman and writer are dressed identically in lacy shirts, gold satin breeches, and red velvet robes, and each sits at a desk. While the draftsman draws one of four programmed images, including portraits of Louis XV and a dog, the writer dips a goose feather in ink and can write custom text of up to 40 characters.

Steam Men were all the rage in the late 1800s, beginning with 22-year-old New Jersey resident Zadoc Dederick’s 1868 model: a 7-foot-9-inch (236 cm) man in a top hat who pulled a carriage. His bulky torso housed a boiler that generated enough power to propel him forward, one footstep at a time.

Canadian George Moore’s 1893 version, unattached to a carriage, measured 6 feet (2 m) tall and resembled a medieval knight. An exhaust pipe emerged from his nostril, making him appear to have steamy breath whenever he walked. His movement was limited by one crucial factor: Since he was attached to a horizontal stabilizing arm, he could only walk in circles.

Tipu’s Tiger, a tidy representation of the enmity between the residents of India and their 18th-century British colonizers, is an Indian-made, crank-operated toy located in the Victoria & Albert Museum. It depicts a tiger mauling a helpless British officer. Turning the handle makes the man’s left hand rise weakly in an attempt to shield his face from the attack. As the hand moves up and down, air rushes through two pairs of bellows. The resulting sounds—beastly growls and the cries of a man in his death throes—leave no ambiguity as to who wins the tussle.

Tipu’s Tiger, immortalized mid-meal.

The Poison Garden

ALNWICK, NORTHUMBERLAND

To enter the poison garden of Alnwick, you must first fetch a guide to unlock the black iron gates, which are decorated with a white skull and crossbones and a worrying message: These plants can kill.

Inspired by the poison gardens in 16th-century Padua where the Medicis plotted the frothing ends of their royal enemies, the Duchess of Northumberland created this garden in 2005, dedicating it entirely to poisonous or narcotic flora.

The duchess, Jane Percy, is an unlikely patron. In 1995, her husband unexpectedly became the twelfth Duke of Northumberland following his brother’s death, and Alnwick Castle fell into their family’s care. Roaming the elaborate gardens, the newly minted duchess decided to transform an overgrown, neglected section into something that was at once both traditional and dangerous. The poison garden now sits nestled among 14 acres of greenery dotted with water sculptures, a cherry orchard, a bamboo labyrinth, and an enormous tree house.

This carefully curated garden contains about 100 plants that have the power to stimulate, intoxicate, sicken, or kill. Guides detail their dangerous properties while enforcing the strict No touching; no smelling rules. Poppies, cannabis, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and deadly strychnine are among the innocent-looking greenery. Because of the danger posed by the flora (some can kill or sicken just through touch), some plants are caged, and the garden is secured under a 24-hour security watch.

If ingested, lily of the valley may cause abdominal pain, vomiting, slowing of the heart, and blurred vision.

Psilocybin mushrooms can induce euphoria, an altered sense of time, and trippy visuals.

Connie macalatum, better known as hemlock, was the poisonous plant used to bring down Socrates.

Williamson Tunnels

LIVERPOOL, MERSEYSIDE

Between 1810 and 1840, an army of workers dug an extensive underground network beneath Liverpool at the insistence of eccentric retired tobacco business owner Joseph Williamson. The purpose for the tunnels remains unclear: According to rumor, Williamson’s religion championed end-of-days survivalism, and the tunnels were meant to house him and his family should Armageddon arrive. Tamer accounts paint Williamson as a selfless philanthropist who was simply providing work for the many men who had recently returned from the Napoleonic Wars. The man’s apparent fondness for instructing his workers to brick up freshly dug tunnels provides a further air of mystery.

The underground project ceased when Williamson died in 1840. Water, rubble, and rubbish filled the tunnels. They remained in a dilapidated state until the 1990s, when local residents formed charitable groups with the aim of excavating the site and opening the tunnels to the public. One section, dramatically lit, is now open for tours.

The Chained Books of Hereford Cathedral

HEREFORD, HEREFORDSHIRE

This cathedral contains two medieval marvels: a chained library of rare books and one of the earliest maps of the world.

In the Middle Ages, before the availability of the printing press, volumes on law and religion were quite rare and valuable. To protect against theft, the books at Hereford Cathedral were chained to desks, pulpits, and study tables.

The chained library was created in 1611 when a collection of hand-transcribed, hand-bound books was moved into the Lady Chapel. Most of the volumes in the collection are acquisitions dating back to the 1100s, although the oldest book in the collection, the Hereford Gospels, dates to about the year 800.

The medieval world map stored at Hereford Cathedral depicts three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. On the as-yet-unexplored periphery of these lands roam fire-breathing dragons, dog-faced men, people who survive on only the scent of apples, and the Monocoli, a race of mythical beings who take shade under their giant feet when the sun becomes too bright.

The 5 × 4.5-foot map (1.5 × 1.4 m), created around 1300, is part geography, part history, and part religious teaching aid. A lack of confirmed information on Asian and African geography presented no obstacle for the mapmaker, who used hearsay, mythology, and imagination to fill in the gaps—which explains the four-eyed Ethiopians.

5 College Cloisters, Cathedral Close, Hereford. The cathedral is a 3.5-hour train trip from London and a 15-minute walk from Hereford railway station.

52.053613 2.714945

Mechanical Clock at Salisbury Cathedral

SALISBURY, WILTSHIRE

The mechanical clock at Salisbury Cathedral is old, but just how old is the subject of ongoing debate. The exact date is a matter of importance, for if it was built in 1386, as many horologists believe, it is the oldest working clock in the world.

The faceless clock introduced Salisbury to the new concept of standardized hours, which would replace the season-based increments of the sundial era. It chimed hourly, reminding townspeople to attend church services, and provided a reliable structure for each day.

In 1928, following its rediscovery in the cathedral tower, the clock was disassembled and restored. Although it no longer chimes, today the clock functions in much the same way as it did more than 600 years ago, striking away the hours in the north aisle of the nave.

Salisbury Cathedral, 33 The Close, Salisbury. Trains from London (Waterloo) take 90 minutes. The cathedral is a 10-minute walk from Salisbury station.

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Salisbury’s 600-year-old timepiece may be the oldest working clock in the world.

The Tempest Prognosticator

OKEHAMPTON, DEVON

Surgeon George Merryweather had a passion for leeches. According to Merryweather, the creepy worms possessed humanlike instincts, experienced the hollow ache of loneliness, and were capable of forecasting weather. All this gave him an idea for a machine that he believed could transform meteorology.

In 1851, Merryweather unveiled his tempest prognosticator at the Great Exhibition in London. Having witnessed the agitation of freshwater leeches during the lead-up to a heavy storm, the doctor concluded he could build a leech-powered weather forecasting device. The contraption resembled a miniature merry-go-round, but in place of the usual ponies were a dozen glass bottles, each containing a single leech. Should a storm approach, the creatures would make their way to the top of the glass, triggering a wire connected to a central bell.

Though certainly novel, Merryweather’s invention did not catch on. His vision of the British government deploying tempest prognosticators nationwide remained mere fantasy, but his invention lives on in the form of a reconstructed version prominently displayed in the Barometer World Exhibition museum in Devon. (Another can be found in the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire.)

Quicksilver Barn, Merton, Okehampton. The museum is open by appointment.

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George Merryweather’s carousel of weather-predicting leeches was more charming than accurate.

No Man’s Land Luxury Sea Fort

GOSPORT, HAMPSHIRE

On maps, it registers as a tiny, nameless speck in the Solent strait between mainland England and the Isle of Wight, but No Man’s Land Fort has a dramatic history that belies its cartographic insignificance.

Built in the late 1800s to protect the English coast against a French invasion that never happened, No Man’s Land could accommodate 80 soldiers and 49 cannons.

The 200-foot-wide (61 m) fort sat idle for decades, and the Ministry of Defense decommissioned No Man’s Land in the 1950s. When the government tried to sell it in 1963, no buyers came forward. In the 1990s, the abandoned fort was transformed into a luxury hotel, complete with two helipads, 21 bedrooms, a roof garden, and restaurants. The submerged center was glassed in as an atrium for the heated pool. Despite its creature comforts and promise of privacy, the hotel never took off.

In 2004, developer Harmesh Pooni bought No Man’s Land for £6 million (about $9 million at the time) with the intention of renting it out for special occasions. Unfortunately, contaminated water in the hotel pool caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. Faced with financial ruin and the possibility of losing the island, Pooni took an extreme approach: He covered the helipads with upturned tables, grabbed his keys, and barricaded himself inside the fortress. After a protracted standoff, he was finally evicted in early 2009.

No Man’s Land sold for the bargain price of £910,000 (around $1.36 million) in March 2009 to Gibraltar-based Swanmore Estates Ltd. The fort has since been transformed into a venue for weddings and corporate retreats. Standout features include a sauna, cabaret club, and a laser tag arena located in the former gunpowder storage area.

The Solent is 1.4 miles (2.3 km) north of the Isle of Wight.

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Now available for laser-themed birthdays.

Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker

KELVEDON HATCH, ESSEX

Much lies beneath the unassuming bungalow.

It’s not concealed anymore—road signs point the way to a Secret Nuclear Bunker—but the underground shelter at Kelvedon Hatch was built in 1953 to stealthily house hundreds of British military and civilian personnel in the event of nuclear attack.

Accessed through an ordinary-looking bungalow in the woods, the bunker had air conditioning and heating, its own water supply, and generators, and was outfitted with radio equipment and protected telecommunications systems.

After the fall of the USSR, the bunker was converted into a museum. Today, its corridors are full of dusty old telephones, Geiger counters, and maps. A few rooms feature battered shop mannequins in cheap wigs—some with the grinning faces of former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major—posed in various states of activity, to demonstrate life in the bunker in the event of an attack.

Crown Buildings, Kelvedon Hall Lane, Kelvedon Hatch. The train from London to Brentwood takes an hour and a half. From there, it’s a 20-minute cab ride to the bunker.

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Greatstone Sound Mirrors

GREATSTONE, KENT

As part of its national defense strategy after World War I, Britain built three massive concrete acoustic mirrors on the southeast coast of England to detect the sound of distant airplane engines in the sky. Working much like giant ears, the trio of reflectors could provide a 15-minute warning of an air invasion by magnifying the sound waves over the English Channel and directing them at microphones. An operator sitting in a nearby booth listened to the transmitted signal through headphones that resembled a stethoscope.

The Greatstone site features three different reflectors, including a 200-foot-long (61 m) curved wall, a 30-foot-tall (9 m) parabolic dish, and a 20-foot-tall (6 m) shallow dish.

Dungeness National Nature Reserve, off Dungeness Road, Romney Marsh.

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Before radar, huge concrete ears were built to listen for incoming enemy aircraft.

Maunsell Army Sea Forts

THAMES ESTUARY, OFF THE EAST COAST OF ENGLAND

Rising from the water like robotic sentinels on stilts, the Maunsell Army Sea Forts in the Thames Estuary east of London are rusting reminders of World War II’s darkest days. Part of the Thames Estuary defense network, the anti-aircraft tower-forts were constructed in 1942 to deter German air raids. Each of the three original forts consisted of a cluster of seven buildings on stilts surrounding a central command tower. Two remain: the Red Sands Fort and the Shivering Sands Fort.

After their wartime career the forts were decommissioned. In the 1960s, pirate-radio broadcasters moved in and established unauthorized stations in the remaining forts. In 1966, Reginald Calvert, manager of the Radio City pirate station, died in a fight with rival Radio Caroline station owner Oliver Smedley. The next year, the British government passed legislation making offshore broadcasting illegal, driving out the pirates and leaving the forts abandoned.

Attempting to enter the decaying forts is not advised. They can be seen by boat or, on a clear day, from Shoeburyness East Beach.

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Top right: An overhead plan of the forts, which were once connected by bridges.

Attention, H. G. Wells: Your rusty invaders have arrived.

Longplayer

LONDON

If you miss hearing Longplayer on your next trip to London, you’ll get the chance to catch it again—the musical composition will be playing in the old lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf for the next 1,000 years. Longplayer consists of six short recorded pieces written for Tibetan singing bowls that are transposed and combined in such a way that the variations will never repeat during the song’s millennium-long run. It began playing on December 31, 1999, and is scheduled to end in the dying seconds of 2999.

Custodians of the project have established the Longplayer Trust to devise ways of keeping the music alive in the face of the inevitable technological and social changes that will occur over the next ten centuries.

64 Orchard Place, London. Open on weekends. The nearest Tube stop is Canning Town. You can also listen to a livestream of the composition on longplayer.org.

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A millennium-long piece of music composed for Tibetan singing bowls will be playing at Trinity Buoy Wharf through 2999.

Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice

LONDON

The Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 marked 50 years of her reign and was an opportunity for Britons to celebrate their mighty empire. The royal celebrations were many and varied, but one refreshingly humble idea for a commemoration came from the artist George Frederic Watts.

Watts proposed that a memorial be established to recognize ordinary people who had died in pursuit of saving others. The painter, who was passionate about social justice for the working class, wanted to remember those whose heroic deaths might otherwise be soon forgotten.

The proposal didn’t catch on at the time, but 13 years later, in the city garden of Postman’s Park, the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was unveiled. It consisted of four plaques on a wall, each devoted to a person who died in a valorous manner. One was Mary Rogers, stewardess of the SS Stella passenger ferry. As the ship sank on March 30, 1899, she gave up her life jacket to another passenger, sealing her own sad fate.

Since the memorial’s unveiling, 50 more plaques have joined the initial four, with the most recent addition in 2009. Among the amazing stories are that of 19-year-old William Donald, whose plaque tells of how he was drowned in the Lea trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weed, and Thomas Simpson, who died of exhaustion after saving many lives from the breaking ice at Highgate Ponds, and George Frederick Simonds, who rushed into a burning house to save an aged widow and died of his injuries.

Postman’s Park, St Martin’s Le-Grand, London. The park is near the St. Paul’s station on the Central Tube line.

Difference Engine #2

LONDON

There was almost a Victorian computer. Charles Babbage came achingly close with his 1822 Difference Engine, a design for a hulking gadget with cranks and gears capable of generating mathematical tables.

The machine offered a well-thought-out solution to the problem of human error in complex calculations, but it proved too large, complicated, and expensive to construct. Government grants allowed Babbage to hire a machinist, Joseph Clement, but after 10 years and much quarreling over prices, Clement had built just a small portion of the prototype.

Undeterred by practical constraints and workplace unpleasantness, Babbage moved on to plans for Difference Engine #2. This would be a more streamlined version: 5 tons, 5,000 parts, and 11 feet long (3.4 m). It, too, never progressed to a working model. Babbage died in 1871, leaving reams of notes and sketches for machines that were beyond the era’s construction capabilities.

In 1985, more than a century after Babbage’s death, London’s Science Museum announced plans to investigate the feasibility of his designs by building a difference engine based on the blueprints—and 19th-century materials—devised for Engine #2. The construction team finished the calculating section in 1991, just in time to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth. It functioned flawlessly, confirming Babbage’s rightful place in the annals of computing history.

The engine, which features a printing apparatus added in 2002, is now on display at the museum, along with half of Babbage’s brain. (The other half is housed at the Hunterian Museum, also in London.)

Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London.

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Now functional: Charles Babbage’s Victorian computer.

Jeremy Bentham’s Auto Icon

LONDON

Jeremy Bentham has been sitting in a corridor at University College London since 1850.

The moral philosopher, whose advocacy of animal welfare, prison reform, universal suffrage, and gay rights was far ahead of his time, left a will with specific instructions on the treatment of his corpse. He decreed that his mummified head and skeleton be clad in a black suit, seated upright on a chair in a wooden cabinet, under a placard reading Auto Icon. He also suggested that his corpse could preside over regular meetings of followers of his utilitarian philosophy.

Bentham’s plans for his remains became something of an obsession. For 10 years prior to his death, he reportedly carried a pair of glass eyes in his pocket so that embalmers could easily implant them after his death. Unfortunately, when the time came, something went wrong in the preservation process. Bentham’s head took on a mottled, hollow-cheeked look, its leathery skin sagging under a pair of intensely blue glass eyes. In order to create a less grotesque display, preservers created a wax bust of Bentham and screwed it onto the skeleton. They placed the real head between Bentham’s feet.

There it sat, undisturbed, until 1975, when a group of mischievous students kidnapped it and demanded a £100 ransom be donated to charity. The university made a counteroffer of £10, and the students caved, returning Bentham’s head to its rightful place between his legs. After a few more pranks, including one in which the skull was apparently used as a football, university administrators decided to remove the head from public display. It now sits in the Conservation Safe in the Institute of Archaeology and is removed only for special occasions.

On Gower Street, between Grafton Way and University Street, enter the university grounds at Porter’s Lodge. Find the ramp entrance to the South Cloisters, Wilkins Building. Jeremy Bentham is just inside.

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Seated in a hallway at University College London, the long-dead utilitarian philosopher guards his own head from those who might souvenir it.

Archie the Giant Squid

LONDON

The giant squid is often depicted as a sea monster. In Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a giant squid attacks a boat and devours one of its crew. The kraken of Norse mythology—an enormous creature whose tentacles could supposedly wrap around the tallest of ship masts and rip whole vessels asunder—likely arose from a combination of giant squid sightings, imagination, and exaggeration.

The deep-sea–dwelling giant squid’s notorious elusiveness only fueled tall tales. Though records show they have been sighted sporadically since the 16th century, it wasn’t until 2002 that photographers were able to capture an image of a live giant squid in its natural habitat—which makes the Natural History Museum’s 28-foot (8.5 m) specimen a rare delight. Caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands in 2004 and named Archie in recognition of its species name, Architeuthis dux, the giant squid is preserved in a custom-made acrylic tank.

Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London. Archie is in the Darwin Spirit Collection of the museum, accessible on special guided tours.

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Caught in 2004 and now kept at the Natural History Museum, Archie the Giant Squid is as long as a school bus.

Highgate Cemetery

LONDON

Opened in 1839, Highgate is one of London’s most famous cemeteries. Its residents include Karl Marx (his memorial recognizable by the glowering bearded bust), sci-fi author Douglas Adams, and Adam Worth, the possible inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. In the Victorian era, anyone who was anyone wanted to be buried in London’s fashionable Highgate Cemetery.

But fashion is fickle. By the 1940s, the Victorian cemetery was in a state of neglect, its once-coveted burial plots covered in vines. In 1970, members of a group interested in the occult claimed to have seen supernatural creatures lurking in the graveyard. Initial reports of ghosts gave way to talk that a vampire—a Transylvanian prince brought to the cemetery in the 1800s—was hiding out in Highgate.

Two self-described magicians and rival monster hunters, Seán Manchester and David Farrant, vowed to track down and kill the beast. Each proclaimed the other to be a charlatan incapable of finding the vampire. They took their feud to the media—capitalizing on an interest in the occult fueled by the recent release of The Exorcist—and announced an official vampire hunt would take place on Friday the 13th of March, 1970. That night, a mob overpowered police and broke into Highgate wielding stakes, garlic, crosses, and holy water. Chaos ensued. No vampires were sighted.

Manchester and Farrant continued to visit the cemetery over the next few years, determined to drive a stake into the heart of the Highgate Vampire. Though neither magician ever found the supposed vampire, real graves were ransacked and real corpses staked and beheaded during the search. In 1974, Farrant received a jail sentence for vandalizing memorials and interfering with human remains in the cemetery.

Debate between Farrant and Manchester continues to this day, while the cemetery remains a popular location for occult, paranormal, and vampire enthusiasts.

Swain’s Lane. The cemetery is a 20-minute walk up Highgate Hill and through Waterlow Park.

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Could there be a vampire lurking behind the trees?

Also in England

Beverley Sanctuary Stones

Beverley · A haven for criminals of all stripes, these stones mark a sacred area where the medieval church provided asylum to thieves and brigands.

The Cheddar Man and Cannibals Museum

Cheddar · A museum about life, death, and cannibalism in prehistoric Britain.

Clapham North Deep-Level Air Raid Shelter

London · An abandoned World War II bomb shelter, it is the only one of eight deep-level air raid shelters that sits unused.

Grant Museum of Zoology

London · A university collection containing bisected heads, extinct animals, and a backlit cavern of microscopic slides.

House That Moved

Exeter · A 21-ton Tudor home built in the 1500s and moved 230 feet (70 m) down the street on thick iron rails in 1961 to make way for a new road.

The Little Chapel

Guernsey · One of the smallest chapels in the world, intricately decorated with stones, pebbles, broken china, and glass.

Lost Gardens of Heligan

St Austell · A 400-year-old garden with fantastical sculptures that has been restored to beauty after years of neglect.

The Lost River Fleet

London · The largest of London’s subterranean rivers now flows through its sewers. The Fleet can be heard flowing through a grate in front of the Coach and Horse pub on Ray Street, Clerkenwell.

The Margate Shell Grotto

Margate · Discovered in 1835, this mysterious subterranean passageway of unknown age is covered with mystical designs made entirely from seashells.

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

Boscastle · The world’s largest collection of occult- and witchcraft-related artifacts includes dried cats.

Sir John Soane’s Museum

London · Cluttered and astounding collection of ethnographic items displayed in the home of their eccentric collector, the 18th-century English architect John Soane.

Steetley Magnesite

Hartlepool · This derelict chemical plant on the North Sea is a photogenic industrial ruin.

Temple of Mithras

London · The rebuilt remains of a Roman temple dedicated to the mysterious ancient cult of Mithras. Considered the most notable of all 20th-century Roman discoveries in London.

The World’s Largest Greenhouse

St Austell · Huge inflated domes at the Eden Project contain artificial biomes with over one million types of plants.

IRELAND

Ruins of the MV Plassey

INISHEER, GALWAY

More rust than metal at this point, the creaky shell of the steam trawler MV Plassey has been sitting on a bed of rocks on the shore of Inisheer Island for over half a century.

Early in the morning of March 8, 1960, the cargo ship was transporting yarn, stained glass, and whiskey across the Atlantic when it got caught in a terrible storm. Fierce winds blew the vessel toward Inisheer, tearing a hole in the bottom and causing water to rush into the engine room.

Using a breeches buoy—a rocket-fired rescue device similar to a zip line—islanders managed to save all 11 members of the crew from the icy sea. No sooner had they warmed up and calmed down with a few shots of local whiskey than another storm hit, delivering the MV Plassey to the rocky coast of Inisheer. Locals salvaged wool, lumber, and doors for construction, and made off with a stash of Black & White scotch hidden in the hold.

Today, the bronze-colored wreck, riddled with holes and stripped of all its assets, looks oddly beautiful against the gray rocks, green grass, and blue sky.

The wreck is on the east coast of Inisheer, just south of Killagoola. Ferries from the mainland leave from Doolin.

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With its flaking hull full of holes, the MV Plassey is slightly less than seaworthy.

Skellig Michael

THE SKELLIGS, KERRY

The dozen monks who sequestered themselves on this rocky island in the 7th century were a hardy lot.

Skellig Michael—skellig is derived from the Irish word sceillic, meaning steep rock—lies 8 miles (13 km) from the coast of County Kerry. It is beset by wind and rain, which make the ascent to its 714-foot-high (217.6 m) peak extra treacherous.

Despite these harsh conditions, a group of determined Irish Christians established a monastic outpost on the island that remains largely intact 1,400 years later. Using stones, the monks built hundreds of stairs leading up to Skellig Michael’s summit, where they erected six beehive-shaped stone huts and a small chapel. They survived on a diet of fish, seabirds, and vegetables grown in the monastery garden. Withstanding multiple Viking raids during the 9th century, the monks occupied Skellig Michael until the late 12th century, when frequent storms sent them back to the mainland.

Climbing the 670 uneven, steep steps to the top presents both a physical and mental challenge, but at the summit, you’ll be able to enter the monastic huts and imagine the grueling life of a 7th-century ascetic.

Boats leave from Portmagee (a 90-minute trip) from April to September, weather permitting.

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Beehive-shaped monastic cells, built by medieval monks, top the rocky island of Skellig Michael.

Newgrange Mound

BOYNE VALLEY, MEATH

Over 600 years before the Egyptians began building the Great Pyramid of Giza, members of the Neolithic Boyne Valley farming community were hard at work creating Newgrange. The 249-foot-wide (76 m) circular mound, constructed out of stones and earth around 3200 BCE, once served as a temple for religious rituals.

The most remarkable feature of Newgrange is its perfect alignment with the sun. At sunrise during the winter solstice, light shines through a precisely positioned window, illuminating the passageway that leads to the central chambers.

Access to Newgrange is by guided tour only, leaving from the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre in Donore. Entry during the winter solstice is by (very popular) lottery.

The Crypts at Christ Church Cathedral

DUBLIN

In 1030, the Viking rulers of Dublin built the original Christ Church Cathedral out of wood. When the Normans invaded in 1171, they tore the cathedral down and built one of stone, adding an enormous crypt.

Laurence O’Toole, the archbishop of Dublin, oversaw the rebuilding process. After O’Toole was canonized as the patron saint of Dublin in 1225, his heart was preserved in a heart-shaped reliquary and kept in the cathedral inside an iron cage.

The saintly heart remained in an alcove until March 2012, when two men pried open the cage and stole the icon. Irish police suspected that a gang that trades in rhino horns was responsible for the theft, but no arrests have been made—and the heart is still missing.

Though the cathedral is smarting from the loss of its heart, it still boasts some fascinating relics in its crypt. Worth seeing are a set of stocks made in 1670 that were once used outdoors to punish criminals publicly and a marble monument depicting Nathaniel Sneyd, an Irish politician who died in 1833. Text beside the sculpture states that he perished by the indiscriminating violence of an unhappy maniac—in other words, he was shot.

The most unusual objects in the crypt are the mummified cat and rat, whose poses suggest they died mid-chase. According to church lore, the cat pursued the rat into a pipe of the church organ during the 1850s, and both became stuck. James Joyce used both cat and rat as a simile in Finnegan’s Wake when he described someone as being as stuck as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that christchurch organ.

Christchurch Place, Dublin.

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Victoria’s Way Indian Sculpture Park

ROUNDWOOD, WICKLOW

Covering 22 acres, this park includes sculptures of an emaciated Buddha, an enormous disembodied finger, and The Split Man, a figure ripping itself in two, representing the mental state of the dysfunctional human. Victor Langheld established the park in 1989 after traveling to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. The series of sculptures, carved in stone by craftsmen in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, represent spiritual progression, from Awakening (a child emerging from a decaying fist) to The Ferryman’s End (a cadaverous old man in a sinking boat, half-submerged in a lake). Jolly figures of Hindu dieties Ganesh and Shiva dancing and playing the flute help lighten the mood.

Roundwood. The park is a 45-minute drive from Dublin. It’s open from May through September. Dress for the damp.

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The emaciated Ferryman invites visitors to contemplate mortality at Victoria Way Sculpture Park.

Leviathan of Parsonstown

BIRR, OFFALY

William Parsons, the third earl of Rosse, built this 58-foot (17.7 m) telescope in the 1840s to investigate the space phenomena he knew as nebulae. At the time, telescopes were not powerful enough to show that these so-called nebulae were actually an assortment of different objects ranging from star clusters and galaxies to clouds of gas and dust. Parsons’s 6-foot-wide (2 m) telescope lens exposed the solar system in greater detail than ever before—though it was not until the 1920s that Edwin Hubble discovered that some of the fuzzy objects were in fact galaxies.

Dubbed the Leviathan of Parsonstown, Parsons’s reflecting telescope remained the largest in the world for over 75 years. However, following the death of the earl of Rosse—and that of his son, who tended to the instrument in his absence—the telescope fell into disuse in 1878 and was dismantled in 1908. Thanks to the seventh and current earl, the telescope was reconstructed in the late 1990s with a new mirror and motors. You can now see the restored Leviathan and learn about its workings in the attached science center.

Birr Castle, Birr. Two hours from Dublin by car and about one hour from Shannon Airport and Galway city.

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The Leviathan may look like a cannon, but it was made for stargazing.

Also in Ireland

The Calendar Sundial

Galway · A modern sundial uses ancient methods to tell time and date perfectly.

St. Michan’s Mummies

Dublin · Down a set of dimly lit narrow stone steps, a vault underneath the church holds dozens of mummified remains, including an 800-year-old Crusader whose finger you are allowed to touch.

Wallabies of Lambay

Lambay Island · Despite being 10,000 miles (16,000 km) from their native Australia, a group of wallabies has made Lambay Island home for the last 25 years after being relocated by the Dublin Zoo.

NORTHERN IRELAND

The Vanishing Lake

BALLYCASTLE, ANTRIM

East of the seaside town of Ballycastle, on the side of the coastal road, is a lake—sometimes. When you get there, it may be gone. But it will come back.

Loughareema, also known as the vanishing lake, sits on a bed of porous limestone with a plug hole that attracts peat. When enough peat accumulates in the hole, it prevents drainage, causing the water level to rise. When the peat dislodges, the lake empties—sometimes disappearing in a matter of hours.

Loughareema Road (by Ballypatrick Forest), Ballycastle. The lake is a 2-hour bus ride from Belfast. Be prepared for a dry chalk bed, an expansive lake, or anything in between.

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The vanishing lake of Ballycastle in its unvanished state.

The Giant’s Causeway

BUSHMILLS, ANTRIM

With its thousands of interlocking hexagonal columns that rise vertically like steps, the Giant’s Causeway is a geological oddity that looks distinctly man-made.

Volcanic activity created the unusual formation near the start of the Paleogene period (23–65 million years ago) when molten basalt came into contact with chalk beds and formed a lava plateau. When the lava cooled quickly, the plateau contracted and cracked, forming 40,000 columns of varying heights that look like giant stepping stones. The largest stand almost 36 feet tall (11 m).

According to legend, an Irish giant by the name of Fionn mac Cumhaill constructed the causeway so he could skip over to Scotland to defeat his Scottish counterpart, Benandonner. While in transit to Scotland, Fionn fell asleep, and Benandonner decided to cross the causeway to look for his competitor. To protect her slumbering husband, Fionn’s wife gathered him up and wrapped him up in cloth to disguise him as a baby. When Benandonner made it to Northern Ireland, he saw the large infant and could only imagine how big Fionn must be. Frightened, Benandonner fled back to Scotland—but the causeway remained.

44 Causeway Road, Bushmills. The causeway is an hour by car from Belfast or 3 hours by bus, which runs along a scenic route.

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The hexagonal basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway are the stuff of Celtic legend.

Also in Northern Ireland

Skate 56 at the Belfry

Newcastle · A church turned indoor skate park.

Peace Maze

Castlewellan · One of the world’s largest hedge mazes celebrates peace in Northern Ireland.

SCOTLAND

Fingal’s Cave

OBAN, ARGYLL AND BUTE

Like something out of an epic fantasy novel, Scotland’s Fingal’s Cave is a 270-foot-deep, 72-foot-tall (82 × 22 m) sea cave with walls of perfectly hexagonal columns. Celtic legends held that the cave was once part of a bridge across the sea, built by giants to fight one another. Science says it was formed by enormous masses of lava that cooled so slowly that they broke into long hexagonal pillars, like mud cracking under the hot sun.

When naturalist Sir Joseph Banks rediscovered the cave in 1772, it quickly captured people’s imagination and inspired the work of artists, writers, and musicians. Composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote an overture about the cave in 1830, the same year painter J. M. W. Turner depicted it on canvas. Thus was born a Romantic-era tourist site that is just as entrancing today.

Get a train from Glasgow to Oban, where you can take a ferry to Craignure, located on the Isle of Mull. A bus will take you to Fionnphort for a boat tour to Staffa.

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The cave’s contours have provided artistic inspiration for everyone from Jules Verne to Pink Floyd.

Mary King’s Close

EDINBURGH

Legend has it that in the 1640s, the hundreds of plague victims who lived in the tight quarters of Mary King’s Close were walled in and left to die. The real story is not as severe, but there are enough unnerving details to ensure the area’s place in history.

In the 17th century, the Black Death spread across Scotland, eventually killing a quarter of its population. The packed, dirty tenements of Edinburgh were particularly prone to the spread of disease, and Mary King’s Close—a network of narrow, semi-subterranean alleys that were home to around 500 people—bore the brunt of it. Ailing patients too weak to move received visits from plague doctor George Rae, who wore head-to-toe leather and a mask with a long bird beak to help protect him from the disease. To save a plague victim, Rae would slice off the top of the victim’s sores and jam a red-hot poker into the wounds to cauterize them. While unbearably painful, the technique did save lives.

Mary King’s Close was quarantined during the plague epidemic and sealed off in the 1750s, when the City Chambers building was constructed on top of the underground warren. Opened to the public via a small entrance in 2003, today the site lures those who have an interest in macabre history and ghost stories. One of the spirits fabled to haunt the winding passages is a ten-year-old female plague victim named Annie. Believers report temperature changes and feeling a strange presence in her room. The pile of toys, dolls, and candy is evidence of her many visitors.

2 Warriston’s Close, High Street, Edinburgh.

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Dog Suicide Bridge

DUMBARTON, WEST DUNBARTONSHIRE

There is something about Overtoun Bridge that lures dogs to their deaths. Since the 1960s, some 50 dogs have perished after leaping from the same spot on the bridge. Hundreds more have jumped but lived, some even returning for a second leap onto the jagged rocks 50 feet (15.3 m) below.

During an investigation, canine psychologist Dr. David Sands and animal habitat expert David Sexton concluded the strong scent of mink that was luring dogs over the edge, dulling their other senses and preventing them from seeing the sheer drop until it was too late.

Overtoun House, Milton Brae, Dumbarton. The bridge is on the grounds of a 19th-century estate about 30 minutes west of Glasgow.

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Garden of Cosmic Speculation

HOLYWOOD, DUMFRIES AND GALLOWAY

Among the daffodils and daisies of the Garden of Cosmic Speculation are black holes, Fibonacci sequences, fractals, and DNA double helixes.

Architectural theorist Charles Jencks and his late wife, Maggie Keswick, designed the 30-acre garden for their own property. Its aesthetic is guided by the fundamentals of modern physics, reflecting the shapes and patterns of the unfolding universe. Begun in 1988, the garden took almost 20 years to build, during which time Keswick succumbed to cancer. Jencks continued the project in her memory, occasionally altering designs in response to shifts and breakthroughs in scientific knowledge. (The Human Genome Project inspired the DNA Garden section, with its plant-threaded double helix.)

Holywood, 5 miles (8 km) north of Dumfries. The garden is open to the public one day a year, during the first week of May. Managed by the Scotland’s Gardens Scheme, the yearly event helps raise money for Maggie’s Centers, a cancer foundation named after Jencks’s late wife.

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Within these gardens are the keys to life and the universe.

Also in Scotland

Britannia Panopticon Music Hall

Glasgow · The world’s oldest surviving music hall.

Cultybraggan Camp

Perth · Built to hold the worst of the worst of Nazi war prisoners.

Dog Cemetery at Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh · The final resting place of mascots and Scottish guards’ loyal canine companions.

The Dunmore Pineapple

Dunmore Park · This house with a top shaped like a giant pineapple, a symbol of hospitality and affluence, was built in the late 1700s and is now available as a vacation rental.

Greyfriars Cemetery Mortsafes

Edinburgh · Cages built over 19th-century burial sites to protect the dead from being disinterred by opportunistic body snatchers.

Holyrood Abbey Ruins

Edinburgh · A ruined 11th-century abbey built by King David I.

The Ruins of St. Peter’s

Cardross · This hulking skeleton of a modernist seminary was completed in 1966 and abandoned in the 1980s.

Scotland’s Secret Bunker

St. Andrews · A bunker that was built to shelter the politicians and essential people of Scotland in the event of nuclear attack.

Yester Castle

Gifford, East Lothian · A castle that opens into a subterranean vaulted goblin hall from the 13th century.

WESTERN EUROPE

Tap here for map of Greece and Cyprus

Tap here for map of Portugal and Spain

AUSTRIA

Esperanto Museum

VIENNA

When Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof invented the Esperanto language in the 1870s, his goal was to ease communication between people of different nationalities. Esperanto, a hybrid of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, is documented and studied at this museum, along with around 500 other constructed languages, or conlangs.

On display is an impressive array of Esperanto objects: sodas and toothpaste containers with Esperanto labels; novels written in Esperanto; language manuals; and 19th-century photographs of planned-language pioneers. At its peak, Esperanto had as many as two million speakers. Esperanto ranks among the top 200 most-spoken languages out of over 6,000 left on the planet. There are estimated to be a thousand native Esperanto speakers, who learned the language as children; among them is the American financier George Soros.

If the museum piques your interest in learning Esperanto, take note that becoming conversant in the language entitles you to join the Esperantist passport service, a worldwide directory of people willing to host Esperanto speakers in their homes free of charge.

Herrengasse 9, Vienna. Take the U-Bahn to Herrengasse.

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On the eve of WWI, Esperantists still dreamed of uniting the world behind a common language.

How to Say Crazy in Toki Pona

More than 900 constructed languages have been invented since the 13th century. Some, like Esperanto and Volapük, were created with the ambitious goal of becoming a universal lingua franca. Others are meant to test the contentious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a person’s worldview is shaped by the vocabulary and syntax available in his or her language.

Toki Pona, created by Canadian linguist Sonja Elen Kisa in 2001, is a language for minimalists. Consisting of just 123 words, the language is meant to reflect a Zen outlook on life. Toki Pona combines simple words to create complex ones—such as joining the words for crazy and water to create the word for alcohol. The language’s two main features—a restricted vocabulary and the linking of root words—also occur in Newspeak, the fictional language used in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Láadan is American science-fiction writer Suzette Haden Elgin’s experimental answer to the feminist hypothesis that existing languages are inadequate for conveying the breadth of female experience. The language, created in 1982, includes words like radiidin, defined as a time [that is] allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.

French author and musician François Sudre began working on Solresol in the 1820s. The language is based on the seven syllables that correspond to sounds on a musical scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and si. Every word is comprised of one or more of those sounds—for example, si means yes while dofalado means sincerity. There are 2,668 words in all.

Since the base sounds correspond to musical notes, Solresol messages can be communicated through musical instruments. Each of the 7 base sounds also corresponds to a color of the rainbow. In his 1902 book on Solresol grammar, Boleslas Gajewski suggested messages be relayed at night, by shooting rockets of each of the seven colors … always separating every syllable as needed, then pausing briefly between every word.

Sentences in Solresol can be performed on a violin, spoken as a series of numbers, or communicated using the colors of the rainbow.

Globe Museum

VIENNA

The world’s only public museum dedicated solely to globes contains around 650 carefully crafted treasures, including terrestrial globes, celestial globes, and tellurions, which mechanically demonstrate the Earth’s movement with the turn of a crank. A browse through the selection offers an excellent timeline of advances in geographical and cosmological knowledge.